Setting up Your Site

Site-level Settings

Change site title and subtitle/tagline

You can change the initial site title, and tagline of your site by navigating to Settings > General. Then edit the Site Title and Tagline fields and save your changes.

Edit the site footer

You can edit the site footer by going to Appearance > Widgets. There you will see Footer areas (1 – 4), one for each layout column available in the footer. Use the small page editor interface to add footer content such as contact information, social media icons, etc. By default, footer area 4 has the CALS UW Logo that you’ll see in the footer as a starting point.

Pages and menu navigation

We have started your website out with a few common page examples. You can further edit, delete, and add whatever pages and content that you need for your website. You will use Appearance > Menus to modify the main site navigation. The CALS theme also supports sub menus within the navigation, but it is best practice to keep these to a minimum, and not to have more than three levels of sub menus. The following documentation will help you with the WordPress Menus.

• https://kb.wisc.edu/wiscweb/67803
• https://wordpress.org/documentation/article/appearance-menus-screen/

Add additional editors/admins

As a site administrator, you can add additional users with their NetID from within the WordPress site dashboard. It is best to add other users with the “editor” role, unless they will specifically be helping you administer the site beyond just simply adding/editing/updating content pages. For websites, it is always good to have one or two designated staff, faculty, or students tasked with keeping the website content up-to-date. If you are using student workers, a faculty or staff should always be directing and monitoring their work. Instructions on how to add additional users is available in the following help doc: https://webhosting.cals.wisc.edu/creating-user-accounts-on-your-website/

Google analytics

Site owners/content managers are responsible for setting up their own Google Analytics should they prefer having that option. If you would like to setup analytics for your website, we do provide a field within the CALSv4 theme to easily add the GA4 Measurement ID to your site. You will find the field under Appearance > Customize > Analytics to configure your site with Google Analytics.

Theme customizer

Your site is using the UW CALS v4 Theme. The default settings are designed to take care of the most common user experience settings that are needed. However, there are some customizations within the theme customizer that can change aspects of the look and feel. You’ll find these options in Appearance > Customize.

People/directory page

It is common for academic-related sites to have a page listing people related to department, lab, or research center. There are a couple of good ways to accomplish this.  One, is to create a page and edit the text of the page with all the information you need. This is the method that you will find in your starter site template. Another option if you have lots of people to manage and display is to use our CALS Directory plugin. If you like to use this option, you can contact us to activate the plugin on your site and set up a meeting for a brief demo.

What’s Next?

Learn how to edit the content on your site by adding and editing pages and posts.